Just because someone is repaying their loans doesn’t mean they’re benefiting from the loans. We have given some conceptual/anecdotal support for this idea in the past, linking to David Roodman’s posts on possible “overlending” and comparing microloans to payday loans. Lately we’ve been investigating something a bit more concrete: how often, and why, do microfinance…
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Orphanages
We haven’t done much work on charities that try to help orphans and vulnerable children, and we intend to do more. Here are some preliminary thoughts, though. At first glance, this area might seem among the simplest and least controversial. SOS Children’s Villages states, “Our sponsors and donors help children whose parents are not there…
Smile Train in its own words
We recently argued that Smile Train has “more dollars than doctors” for its core program. In that light, yesterday’s Virginian-Pilot article (which quotes me) is interesting: The main story is that Smile Train has been trying to make substantial and unrestricted grants to another major cleft surgery charity, Operation Smile. This despite the fact that…
Going deeper on “room for more funding”: Underfunded grant proposals
We previously discussed some simple ways to get at the difficult question of “room for more funding.” One approach that has been more difficult than expected is asking charities themselves to help figure out where more funds are likely to go – answers tend to be vague and tend to target what the charities think…
Some simple ways to check “room for more funding”
We have been struggling with the “room for more funding” question since the first days of GiveWell, and we have gradually developed a variety of approaches to it. The most basic approach, and the one we’ve used for most of our history, consists of the following: Gain confidence in an entire organization; do not overfocus…
“Room for more funding” continued: Why donation restricting isn’t the easy answer
Yesterday we discussed the difficult question of “room for more funding”: how can a donor determine how more funding will translate to more activities? One common practice is to try to “force” your donation to fund the activities that attract you. Charities will formally honor your restriction by allocating your funds to the program in…